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https://www.barrons.com/articles/idealisms-reality-check-1379014053

Idealism's Reality Check

By

Robert Milburn

Sept. 12, 2013 3:27 p.m. ET

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By

Robert Milburn

Sept. 12, 2013 3:27 p.m. ET

This week, in New York City, Reason magazine hosted Vanity Fair contributing editor and author Nina Munk, as she discussed her recent book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. The book chronicles the six-plus years Munk spent following the distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs, from Dertu, Kenya to Ruhiira, Uganda, on his crusade to end extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

In her book, Munk purposely avoids passing judgement and lets her on-the-ground reporting speak for itself. Yet skeptical questioners in Tuesday night's audience drew out her personal views on the subject. Much to Munk's chagrin, she recounted the celebrity economist's ultimate failure to deliver on his lofty promises.

In November 2006, Munk was dispatched by Vanity Fair to follow Sachs during the initial rollout of his Millennium Villages Project. Sachs had just published his book, The End of Poverty, a call to action for global leaders. The goal of Millennium, a non-governmental organization, was to implement Sachs' blueprint for empowering millions of destitute Africans.

When Munk first met Sachs, the economist was rallying financial support through a whirlwind of speeches at the United Nations and private talks with donors and government officials worldwide. In one speech, Sachs argued vehemently, "Either you leave people to die or you decide to do something about it." As Munk wrote, "Who can resist Sachs' call to action? After all, two billion people on the planet are scraping by on less than a dollar or two a day."

To Sachs' credit, his tireless efforts yielded $200 million in funding for the Millennium program with significant backing, $50 million, from billionaire investor George Soros.Through the generous donations of wealthy benefactors, the project intended to implement a set of "interventions" in 79 villages throughout ten African countries over a five year period. While the world sat on its hands, Sachs was actually doing something. How commendable.

The program provided, among other things, funding for fertilizer and high-yield seeds to diversify crops, anti-malarial mosquito bed nets, and also would help develop necessary infrastructure for basic healthcare, clean water and primary education. The idea was to provide a "big push" of foreign aid that would tackle all of the village's tough problems at once, as opposed to a piecemeal approach. That approach has been tried in blighted neighborhoods of American cities, with mixed results.

Munk recalled being hopeful at the program's outset. "Who doesn't want poverty to be ended," she remarked. Yet, as Sachs' interventions were implemented its organizers dealt with a host of unforeseen consequences. She compared the scramble that ensued to a game of whack-a-mole, in which the workers "would implement interventions in the villages and there would be improvements," but as soon as they got a handle on one problem a host of others popped up.

In Dertu and Ruhiira, Munk witnessed the struggles first hand—a drought decimated the village's camel herds, extreme rains washed away their crops, the efforts to supply clean water proved exceedingly elusive, and the Millennium-provided hardware, like laptops and solar panels, mysteriously went missing.

As time went on, Munk became increasingly disillusioned. Setbacks were denied and the results released by Millennium became increasingly suspect. "It was very disheartening to see the disconnect between the reality on the ground and what was being told in the official publications and press releases of the organization," she lamented. Munk tried to get her hands on two postmortem reports commissioned by the Millennium Villages Project, after the project was completed. She was denied access to the reports.

The Millennium project mirrored what happens broadly at a large number of NGOs, she believes. These organizations become increasingly concerned with placating donors, assuring them that their money is not being wasted, regardless of reality.

The villagers, too, were complicit in this fallacy. "One of the astonishing discoveries was how quickly these villagers realize, that when the rich, white guys show up, they have to assure that visitor his donations are going to good use," she said. So when Jeffrey Sachs visited, he got a skewed picture of reality. That's survival, said Munk, any one of us would do the same-and you'd be stupid not to.

During a visit to Dertu, Sachs praised the opening of a livestock market saying, "People will come from many, many kilometers away to your market! It will be the most important market in the region!" The crowd went wild following the spirited speech, but just a few months later the market was abandoned. Why? The people of Dertu didn't mind traveling the extra 400 kilometers to get an extra hundred shillings at another market. Furthermore, the pastoralists hoarded their primary livestock, camels, as a symbol of wealth even when it made sense to sell them. The endeavor flopped, in short, because the program failed to take the local culture into account.

It is not that foreign aid or philanthropic donations are inherently flawed, Munk explained, it's the dependency that grows as a result. That can be dangerous, she said, and the only way forward for philanthropy is to be transparent, letting donors know about the failures as well as the successes. "By speaking about the failures, you accord more weight to the successes." It worries her deeply that there could be a charitable backlash because of her book, in which all aid to Africa is viewed as inherently flawed.

A particularly interesting discussion ensued when Barron's economics editor and the night's moderator Gene Epstein questioned the fairness of a passage in Munk's book. It describes a conversation between Munk and Sachs at an $8 million townhouse Columbia paid for as part of his inducement to move from Harvard. She writes, with its "six bedrooms and working fireplaces… [and] particularly appealing is its south-facing garden... The day we met, with the tulips in full bloom, he was grateful to have that garden." The purpose, she said, was to demonstrate how little someone of Sachs' background could understand the abject poverty in which these villagers lived.

Munk described her own difficulty in trying to empathize with the inhabitants of Dertu and Ruhiira while she lived there. "I didn't even begin to scratch the surface," she said, "as a reporter always knowing that at any moment you can get the hell out, by definition means that you don't understand it." Furthermore, she added, "I can assure you, that as much as I don't understand it, Jeffrey Sachs really, really, really doesn't understand it."

Sachs, of course, denies Munk's entire narrative. In an email passed to Munk by a colleague, Sachs, in characteristic fashion, wrote, "I can't account for Nina Munk's cynicism. It is what it is, but it's not at all the real story, which she simply missed. Sorry to say, but it's like Vanity Fair meets extreme poverty. Well, so be it."

A witty quip, to be sure, but the facts on the ground - as documented by Munk - are what they are.

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